Unsettling the Spirit of ’76

At first glance, Indigenous responses to the 1976 U.S. bicentennial (officially designated the Bicentennial Celebration of American Independence and the American Revolution Bicentennial Observance) appear much less dramatic than the unprecedented march, rally, and counterreenactment organized by activists in Sydney or Burnum’s flag planting and colonial counterclaim in Dover. There was no single event of mourning protest or survival celebration, nor any single proclamation, serious or satiric, that coalesced into a national statement or slogan. The response to 1976 was more diffuse and more muted, and understandably, it has received far less attention than other aspects of 1970s activism and writing. Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) and Robert Warrior (Osage), for instance, see no reason to mention the U.S. bicentennial in their seminal account of the era, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (1996). My own research confirms Smith and Warrior’s conclusions about the “unraveling” of the national Indian movement in the wake of the siege at Wounded Knee: the government’s extended legal assault on AIM exhausted both material and human resources for ongoing, large-scale opposition to federal policies—or, for that matter, settler celebrations (270). It is thus not surprising that American Indian responses to the U.S. bicentennial cluster in the several years prior to 1976, rather than during the year itself, and that much of their energy focuses on anticipating the importance of the bicentennial as an icon of an enduring colonial ideology rather than on marking a single day, such as the Fourth of July, as an important anniversary around which to rally.¹³ Despite these constraints, however, similar to Indigenous responses to the bicentennial in Australia, American Indian responses in the United States were nonetheless both event centered and discursive, and they were far more extensive than our current scholarship would suggest.

A full account of Indigenous responses to the U.S. bicentennial is a task better suited to a historian than to a literary scholar, and I do not attempt to produce such an account here. Rather, in the early sections of the chapter I analyze the discourse produced during what appears to have been the largest event of American Indian anticipation of the bicentennial observances, the American Indian Bicentennial Conference held in Arizona in early 1973. In later sections, I analyze American Indian discursive anticipations of 1976, including a number of literary texts. In addition to essays and poems, I draw attention to the mostly forgotten anticipatory fiction of Indians’ Summer, a novel by Nasnaga (Remnant Band Shawnee) published in 1975, as well as to the mostly forgotten alternative historical fiction of The Indians Won, a novel by Martin Cruz Smith (Seneca del Sur/Yaqui) published in 1970. I conclude with brief analyses of a range of Indigenous discourses published during the bicentennial year itself, including works by well-known American Indian intellectuals Vine Deloria Jr. (Dakota) and N. Scott Momaday. As an epilogue, I return to the explicit juxtaposition with Indigenous Australia to consider possible legacies of these unsettled Spirits of ’88 and ’76.

A full decade before the bicentennial anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence from Britain, on July 4, 1966, the U.S. Congress chartered the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC), a small committee of part-time volunteers charged to “plan, encourage, develop, and coordinate the commemoration of the American Revolution Bicentennial” (ARBA, 1:n.p.). Six years later, on July 4, 1972, President Nixon issued the “Invitation to the World,” a call to join the United States in its upcoming celebrations. By the beginning of 1973, however, it was clear that the volunteer and part-time commission was less than ideally suited for its monumental task, and it faced a series of criticisms in the national media and in government inquiries. By the end of the year, at the public urging of the president, Congress restructured the ARBC as the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA), granting it broader organizational and fiscal powers; in early 1974, John W. Warner was appointed as administrator.¹⁴ The ARBA remained active throughout 1976. In early 1977, as required by its charter, the administration completed a five-volume final report of its activities; the ARBA was then abolished on September 30.

Part of the administration’s challenge, and one of Warner’s explicit goals, was to involve the full range of the U.S. population—young and old, women and men, urban and rural, demographic majority and racial, ethnic, and religious minority—in the bicentennial festivities. These diverse events and community projects were to be organized around three broad themes. Under the banner of the first theme, Heritage ’76, citizens were encouraged “to remember our form of government, our Founding Fathers, our forgotten people, the places and things of our past, the events of our past and, most important, our freedoms.” The second theme, Festival U.S.A., was meant to help citizens celebrate “the richness of our diversity, the vitality of our culture, our hospitality, the American scene and the traditions of our people.” And within the scope of the third theme, Horizons ’76, the American people were asked to actively plan “to shape a better tomorrow by beginning with individual initiative, by drawing inspiration from the innovations of today, by seeking the blessing of liberty for ourselves and others and by setting our Century III goals” (ARBA 1:n.p.). The final report emphasizes the ARBA’s confidence in its themes to focus citizens on the settler nation’s rich history, present diversity, and hopes for the future by playing on the visual pun between the pronoun us and the abbreviation U.S.: Heritage ’76, “Let Us Remember!”; Festival U.S.A., “Let Us Celebrate!”; and Horizons ’76, “Let Us Shape a Better Tomorrow!” (ARBA 1:251). Organizing this national remembering, celebrating, and planning was no small endeavor. Early in its own planning, the ARBA decided to forego scheduling a single national event in the style of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in the colonial city of Philadelphia and, instead, to encourage large and small communities around the nation and among its several off-shore territories (no matter their lack of connection to the original colonies) to create local events of national significance. Involving racial, ethnic, religious, and immigrant minorities, including Indigenous communities on reservations and in rural and urban areas around the country, proved especially challenging. As noted in the final report, among other so-called minority groups, “many Native Americans and Blacks were seriously questioning whether they had anything to celebrate” (1:191).

The final report devotes a surprising amount of space to Native questioning of the bicentennial and to Native participation in—or protest of—specific events. Early in volume one, for instance, the report acknowledges that 1976 marked a second anniversary of particular significance for American Indians: “Another historical footnote. Just one hundred years ago our Western frontier was still open. While the world participated in the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia, General George A. Custer and his troops were wiped out by Indians led by Sitting Bull at the Battle of the Little Big Horn” (1:14). Despite its stereotypical language and seeming lack of self-awareness in its use of pronouns, the report nonetheless records Indigenous perspectives. Later in the volume, in the section titled “The States and the Communities Celebrate,” the report includes the subheading “Native American Communities,” remarking:

The Bicentennial was providing a new insight into the status and problems of Native Americans. As the nation celebrated its 200th year, they hoped the Bicentennial would be instrumental in drawing attention to such problems as treaties, water and natural resources and the need for a better standard of living, better health facilities and better housing and education. (1:99)

In its account of a bicentennial reenactment of the Boston Tea Party, where colonists dressed as Indians to protest unfair treatment by Britain, the report mentions that the Boston Indian Council staged a protest of its own, “claiming defamation of character” (1:107). One of the several subheadings under the section “Commemorating Our Heritage” is “The Earliest Americans.” The report states:

Many people believe the treatment of Native Americans as the nation spread west is an embarrassing blot on our national history. It came as no surprise, then, that Native Americans approached the Bicentennial observance with caution, coolness and, at times, bitterness. Why, after all, should the American Indian celebrate the founding of the nation which treated his ancestors to massacre and plunder, forcing them off the land occupied by his people for centuries? Charles Johnson, director of the Portland Urban Indian Program, declined an invitation to join a Bicentennial Wagon Train passing through Oregon. “We felt the invitation was like the Germans inviting the Jews to celebrate Hitler’s rise to power,” he said. (1:130)

In the subsection that follows, “Here Come the Beads and Trinkets,” the report describes part of the consultation process the ARBA conducted with Indigenous peoples and notes that Native Americans eventually “did take part in the Bicentennial observance, mounting impressive programs highlighting their traditions and culture, often with the assistance of funds provided by the ARBA” (1:130). The next subsection, “Indians Favor Tangible Projects,” describes several projects that received federal funding: the building of a tribal museum, an urban Indian Center, and a community house. Clearly, the ARBA was invested in highlighting its theme of building for the future while commemorating the past.

Further into the volume, under the heading “People, People, People,” the report reveals specific details about the ARBA consultation process and how so many Native communities came to actually propose programs and “tangible projects.” Under the subheading “The Nation Ought to Know,” the report states, “Many Native Americans approached the Bicentennial with little enthusiasm. The American Indian Movement and other activist groups even suggested a counter-commemoration to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Indian victory over General George A. Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, or a boycott of the whole Bicentennial” (1:191). The report then states, “At the prodding of Thomasine Hill, a Crow Indian and one of the newest and youngest members of the ARBC, a three day conference was held in Tucson, Arizona in January 1973 to explore the problem” (1:193). The “problem” explored by the conference held in Tucson was, of course, how American Indians ought to respond to the settler nation’s call to participate in its bicentennial. Thomasine Hill served as one of the part-time volunteer members of the ARBC between 1972 and 1974. Of Crow and Pawnee descent and raised on the Crow Reservation in Montana, where her father was a member of the tribal council, Hill had gained national exposure when named Miss Indian America in 1968. From 1972 to 1974, she was the youngest member of the ARBC and the sole American Indian on the commission. She happened to be an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, located in Tucson, where she was majoring in American history with a minor in the new interdisciplinary field of American Indian studies.¹⁵

The final report states that the so-called Tucson conference involved “150 representatives of more than 30 Indian tribes in 20 states” (1:193). Though accurate, this account does not acknowledge that the event was held at the University of Arizona or that it was organized by neither government officials nor tribal leaders but by the Amerind Club, the university’s Native student organization, of which Hill was an active member. At the end of their four-day National Bicentennial Conference, which ran from January 7 to 10, the students and their faculty adviser wrote, edited, and published a detailed report of the proceedings, Indians and 1976: Native Americans Look at the American Revolution Bicentennial Observance. In their own report, the students state that “Indians representing the more than 200 tribes in the United States were asked to attend, along with over 300 Indian and non-Indian representatives of the government, business, education, the Bicentennial Commission, and private parties. Those in attendance at the conference made up the body called the Native American Indian Council” (n.p.). It was the first event in which American Indians anticipated, on a national scale and as a self-described collective body, their potential responses to the settler celebration.

University of Arizona president John P. Schaefer concludes his foreword to the Native students’ 1973 conference report: “At a time when Indian problems—and many other problems—are resulting in turmoil and bloodshed, the American Indian Bicentennial Conference, by its very success, becomes a lesson of national significance” (ii). The ARBA final report echoes these sentiments in an early section titled “Tension Everywhere,” acknowledging that the determining contexts for planning the bicentennial included the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, large-scale U.S. military involvement in Vietnam beginning in 1965, President Johnson’s 1968 decision not to run for reelection, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy that same year, and President Nixon’s resignation in 1974 (4–8). What the ARBA report does not acknowledge, but the university president suggests, is the additional context of large-scale American Indian activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In particular, the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan and occupation of the BIA had occurred on the eve of Nixon’s reelection in late 1972, when the Native students and their guests would have been preparing for the conference in Tucson; the so-called Siege at Wounded Knee had begun in late February 1973, a little over a month following the conference, when the students and their adviser would have been preparing their report for publication. In other words, the American Indian Bicentennial Conference was immediately preceded and followed by national events of Indigenous political protest and confrontations with U.S. state and federal forces. The events of the early 1970s were looking awfully similar to their counterparts from the century before.

The Amerind Club organized its conference around the three themes proposed by the ARBC: Heritage ’76, Festival U.S.A., and Horizons ’76. Prominent Native and non-Native individuals were invited to address each theme; speeches were followed by caucus meetings during which participants debated specific topics and worked to build consensus toward the final resolutions that were to be delivered to President Nixon and the ARBC on behalf of the Native American Indian Council. In their report, the students provide the texts of all but one of the keynotes, as well as summaries of the caucus deliberations and the concluding discussion, recommendations, and resolutions. The Heritage ’76 section featured speeches by Ed McGaa (Oglala Sioux), cochairman of Minnesota’s Bicentennial Commission, and Helen Byrd, who spoke on behalf of James Biddle, chairman of the Heritage Committee of the national ARBC, who was unable to travel to Tucson. The Festival U.S.A. section featured speeches by George E. Lang, chairman of the Festival Committee of the ARBC (whose speech is briefly summarized but not reported in full); David Warren, cultural director of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Emory Sekaquaptewa (Hopi), professor of anthropology and director of the Indian Studies Program at the University of Arizona. Finally, the Horizons ’76 section featured speeches by Frank Angel, who is described as “a Chicano member of the Commission”; Wendell Chino (Mescalero Apache), who had held leadership positions in his tribe and in the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI); Harvey Little Elk Wells, who is not identified by tribal affiliation but is described as “associated with the American Indian Culture Center at UCLA” and as a leader in AIM; and Charles Trimble, who also is not identified by tribal affiliation but is described as former executive director of the NCAI and current director of the American Indian Press Association.

Speeches range widely in content and tone, as do caucus discussions. In the opening set of speeches, McGaa and Byrd seem oddly in sync with each other but out of sync with the spirit of the conference. In “The Dilemma of the Non-Indian World,” McGaa generalizes a vague Native “respect” for “Mother Earth” and urges the United States to relearn this respect to be “more successful as a nation” (4). In “The Meaning of Heritage ’76,” Byrd explains the ARBC’s philosophy as a recognition that “the American Revolution is a permanent process of renewal, change and improvement” and, thus, “a continuing revolution” (6). How might American Indians participate in this ongoing renewal? In offering specific suggestions, Byrd echoes McGaa. She notes there is a “need for a comprehensive history of the tribes of the American Indian [. . .] an encyclopedia of the Native American—that could be a lasting contribution for the Bicentennial, not only for all Americans, but for the entire world” (9). In addition, “We need to recreate that sense of community life in America that has always been a part of the American heritage. And the American Indian can help the nation do so” (9). More precisely:

We have a great deal to learn from the American Indian. It is more apparent now when our country becomes increasingly concerned over the protection of the natural environment. The American Indian symbolizes the human love of nature and, I believe, has preserved a better sense of man’s deep-seated dependence on nature than his fellow Americans. (10)

In a final suggestion, Byrd notes, “The tribes could play an important role as hosts to people from the cities in bringing them closer to nature for at least the vacation part of the year” (10). In brief, Byrd suggests American Indians can participate in the “continuing revolution” by producing a comprehensive written history of their tribal past, helping the settler nation to re-create its lost sense of community, serving as a symbol of the settlers’ lost respect for Mother Earth (this is also McGaa’s recommendation), and hosting urban non-Natives on their rural reservations for back-to-nature holidays. She concludes, “To sum it all up, history is an interpretation of the past” (10). Or stated plainly, for the bicentennial Indians were asked to serve as icons of an idealized past that was distinctly of the settlers’ making and for the settlers’ benefit.

The summary of the first caucus discussion focuses on neither McGaa nor Byrd. Instead, conference participants pose the larger questions these speakers failed to raise:

How do we participate in the American Revolution Bicentennial? What do we want to accomplish? What goals and objectives shall we attain? How well can Indian History benefit us in the future? Also, the question: “Shall we participate?” has to be considered. Will we be celebrating the defeat of our people? (12)

Moreover, participants wanted basic questions answered about federal funding: “How much money will be available?” (12). By the end of discussion, they reached consensus that “the American Indians want[ed] to make known that their history and culture exceed[ed] the established 200-year anniversary” and that they “should have veto power over the Indian’s part in the celebration” (13). But there was no clear agreement about how or even if Indians should participate:

Some suggested that we ask for a separate Indian Bicentennial and ask for funding from the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. Others pointed out the alternative of whether we should participate at all. We could hold a counter-celebration, celebrating the Little Big Horn on June 25, 1976, or the Pueblo revolt [of 1680], or even boycott the celebration, expressing our discontent with the exploitation and oppression that has continued since July 4, 1776. (14)

The caucus summary ends with an activist sentiment directed at Byrd and the ARBC committee she represented: “In any case, whether we participate or not our needs should be met according to our standards instead of those of the whiteman” (14; emphasis added).

The second and third sets of keynotes were more diverse. Of particular interest are the speeches by Sekaquaptewa, “Strengthening Indian Traditions”; Wells, “Bicentennial No! Counter-celebration Yes!”; and Trimble, “Indian Horizons: A Contemporary Look.” All three raise political implications of the bicentennial in the context of the difficult realities that Indian communities had faced for decades and were likely to continue to face in the near future. Reworking Byrd’s slogan of a “permanent process of [U.S.] renewal,” Sekaquaptewa emphasizes how “the Indian, with the help of the white man in some cases, is revitalizing his Indianness.” He notes, however, that “once again the Indian faces the question of whether his survival is a political matter or whether it is a cultural matter” (21). The dominant society defines survival in terms of cultural traits linked to the past, ignoring political issues set in the present and limiting conceptions of the future: “Under these pressures, the Indian seems more concerned about convincing the whiteman about his Indianness—rather than to strengthen his own feelings about being an Indian.” “But is the Indian enhanced through better understanding of him by non-Indians?” Sekaquaptewa asks. “Who is the real beneficiary?” (22). Wells, in keeping with the activist slogans of his title, takes a position directly opposed to Byrd’s and advances arguments for commemorating the 1876 Indian victory at the Little Bighorn rather than the U.S. bicentennial. Wells continues Sekaquaptewa’s distinction between political and cultural revitalization: “The American Revolution’s victorious conclusion was in fact the death knell for the sovereignty, independence, and freedom of our people. The victory of the American government cannot be interpreted as a victory for us” (36). Finally, Trimble invokes the “crisis situation in Indian affairs today.” He is the only speaker to refer directly to the recent Trail of Broken Treaties in Washington, D.C., noting that although these events did not create the current situation, “We can safely say that those disruptions provided the catalyst to escalate the crisis” (38). In Trimble’s account the problem is Indian leadership that is neither unified nor adequately independent of the U.S. government: “Where are the Indian voices of protest? Where is the Indian leadership? Indian leaders have emerged in abundance. Indian leadership is nearly totally absent” (40).

While the caucus discussions covered equally diverse ground, they often returned to practical issues, such as “the present conditions in reservation and off-reservation housing and the urbanization of Indian life” (26). The students report the sentiments of participants this way: “America is free for 200 years, but the Indians are not free on their own reservations. How can anyone be proud in such a situation?” (26). Similar concerns were raised about education: “It was obvious to most participants that the whole educational system for the Indian students must be to interrelate and fuse traditional contexts and methods with current knowledge and educational innovations. This challenge must be taken up by Indians and concerned non-Indians” (47). Inevitably, discussions returned to the question of whether Indians should participate in the bicentennial, create a countercelebration, or boycott. The students report, “[The] rationale offered by boycott advocators failed in the end when participants voted in favor of participation as opposed to non-participation (complete boycott) on the one hand and tokenism on the other” (49). All participants agreed that “communication was [. . .] a basic problem for Indian groups in all subject areas dealing with the bicentennial observance” and highly recommended the creation of a “Central Indian Information Center” as a vehicle that would “disseminate bicentennial information to all tribal and urban groups” (50). The report ends its summary of discussions, “The greatest unity existed regarding the importance of not allowing Indians to be taken for granted in the bicentennial plans and operations.” In what appears another direct response to Byrd’s speech on behalf of the Heritage Committee, the students state, “The days of performing Indians seems to be over” (52).

After listing the caucus recommendations under each theme and the three resolutions passed by a majority vote of participants, the students conclude their report with the two-page letter Thomasine Hill sent to President Nixon on January 19, 1973. Hill briefly overviews the purpose of the American Indian Bicentennial Conference, notes the active participation “of over 150 individuals from 20 states and over 30 tribes,” and lists a sampling of the “represented organizations.” She also announces that the proceedings will be published by the University of Arizona Press. Enclosed with her letter are the conference program and the three formal resolutions, which ask that (1) the ARBC actively seek Indian staff members, (2) states with significant Indian populations include Indian representation on their state-level bicentennial commissions, and (3) the president and the ARBC consider the formation of a separate National American Indian Bicentennial Committee “to insure proper representation of Native Americans in all aspects of planning” (63–64). Hill states that, in addition to President Nixon, she is sending copies of her letter “to the National and State American Revolution Bicentennial Commissions, Arizona Senators and Congressmen, and over 500 urban [and] reservation Indians and organizations.” To conclude, she situates the immanent near future of 1976 within broader understandings of the significant distant future and the significant past: “The American Indian involvement in the American Revolution Bicentennial Observances is an act of faith and hope that the next 100 years will be more promising than the last 200 years” (emphasis added). Hill signs her name under the suggestive closing “In the Spirit of ’76” (66).

The letter and the three resolutions Hill sent to President Nixon appear to have been received within that spirit of revolution. A number of changes were made to how bicentennial planning was conducted at the federal level after 1973. On July 1, 1974, not long after Warner’s appointment, the newly commissioned ARBA established a Native American Programs Office in Denver, Colorado, “in recognition of the special relationships existing between the Federal Government and the American Indian and of the desirability of encouraging Native Americans to become an integral part of the Bicentennial commemoration.”¹⁶ The following year, on August 4, 1975, Warner established the Racial, Ethnic, and Native American Advisory Committee; four of its twenty-five members are identified as American Indians and one as a Pacific Islander (ARBA, 2:34). Warner met with American Indian representatives in Washington, DC, during 1975, and by 1976 he had “visited 111 different tribes” around the country, “encouraging them to take part in the Bicentennial however they saw fit, but in any event to participate” (ARBA, 1:193). The Native American Programs Office reported in September 1975 that, as a result of these and other efforts at consultation and encouragement:

25 Indian tribes and reservations have been designated as Bicentennial Communities by ARBA thus far, 42 projects have been funded from non-appropriated funds for a total of $661,340, and 62 projects have been funded from appropriated funds for a total of $1,326,469, and 56 native projects have been funded from Title X of the Public Works and Economic Development Act of 1965 in the amount of $6,122,700. (foreword, n.p.)

By the end of 1976, according to the ARBA final report, the number of tribes designated as Bicentennial Communities had risen to thirty-eight (1:193). The Native American Programs Office describes the wide range of funded projects as “perpetuating Indian culture and tradition, the improvement of communications among the tribes, the establishment of museums and handicraft centers, and the promotion of tourism to Indian areas, among others” (n.p). Whether these projects would result in a “permanent process of renewal” for Indigenous individuals and communities, of course, could not be known at the time. The official reports suggest there was considerable enthusiasm for the high level of direct funding and for the high level of local input and control.

Several prominent intellectuals were absent from the American Indian Bicentennial Conference, including D’Arcy McNickle and Vine Deloria Jr. McNickle would have been completing his influential study Native American Tribalism: Indian Survivals and Renewals, published toward the end of 1973. He was likely also already updating They Came Here First: The Epic of the American Indian, his work of history and anthropology originally published in 1949; the revised edition was released in 1975. Deloria, too, was busy with timely projects. His widely read polemic on American Indian spirituality, God Is Red, appeared in 1973, followed in 1974 by his historical and legal contextualization of recent American Indian activism, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence.

Although their titles seem pointed at the bicentennial, none of these books overtly anticipates the coming festivities of 1976. Each does, however, assess the impact of contemporary activism on the Indigenous near future. “It now seems likely, after Washington and Wounded Knee,” McNickle writes in the preface to Native American Tribalism, “that anger will hang in the air, like a combustible vapor, for some time to come” (xii). In the conclusion, he attributes the potential for volatile anger to effect positive change not to Indigenous action per se but rather to Indigenous writing and publication: “All through North America, from the Arctic to the Florida peninsula, the long submerged Indian minority has been discovering the value of the published word, and this may prove to be the decisive force in bringing into being an enduring policy of self-determined cultural pluralism” (169). Like the students at the University of Arizona who organized conference participants into a collective body, McNickle envisions the power of activist voices in terms of collective agency:

Finally, it can be noted in closing that the spokesmen of earlier years who tried to accept what an alien world offered their people, seeing no other choice open, are now silent. If the Indian race is to be destroyed, the new voices avow, the destroying agent will have to contend with an integrating tribal people, not with isolated individuals lost in anonymity. (170)

In the wake of the multi- and intertribal activism of the Trail of Broken Treaties and the Siege at Wounded Knee, and in the tidal surge of new Native writing in all genres, McNickle anticipates a future of “integrating tribal people.” As we shall see, McNickle was not alone in envisioning the power of collective action to create a distinctly Indigenous near future.¹⁷

Other commentators were more direct in either contemplating or performing Indigenous responses to the upcoming U.S. bicentennial. In its Fall 1974 issue, for instance, The Indian Historian, the journal of the American Indian Historical Society, based in California, published “The Bi-Centennial Celebration and the Native American” by Helen L. Harris (Choctaw/Creek), who is described as having earned a PhD in English. Harris is particularly concerned about the kinds of representations that will inevitably circulate—and the kinds of representations that will most likely not circulate—during 1976. She writes:

The crux of the ever-current disparagement of the Indian, and especially now, as the bi-centennial date approaches, has always been the same: it was his country and he somehow escaped complete extermination. He is also the most damaging witness against the image that the conservatives want to reaffirm in 1976. The Indian “problem” must be settled once and for all.

To serve that purpose, the tattered old arguments of the past have re-surfaced in popular rallying cries. (5)

As a concrete example of these “tattered old arguments” in action, Harris analyzes Tom Sawyer, a “family” film produced by the popular periodical the Reader’s Digest, based on the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, first published during the U.S. centennial in 1876.¹⁸ Harris argues that the popular film adapts Twain’s novel, “a parable of frontier America [that shows] why it should rid itself of the Indian,” to accentuate the already negative portrayal of the character Injun Joe, especially through its “visual effects” and its creation of highly stereotypical scenes that emphasize “Joe’s presence as a malevolent threat to the town” (6):

This exploitation of Mark Twain’s literary reputation and augmentation of his portrayal of the Indian’s malevolence in order to glorify the past and justify killing the Indian is only one example of an indirect method of disparaging the Indian. Rather than risk being recognized as a “racist”—bad for one’s image—the defender of manifest destiny selects and publicizes disparagement from a revered source. (7)

She concludes by situating Tom Sawyer within the context of Twain’s later works, in which he critiqued the excesses of U.S. colonialism. Harris implies that, in its pursuit of a popular view of the U.S. nineteenth century, the film not only maligns Indians as savages but also mischaracterizes Twain, one of the period’s more complex thinkers about race and colonialism and an example of the dominant culture’s ability for self-critique and change.

The same issue published a letter from Charles Tate (Chickasaw), who wrote in response to a call “for comments from leading Indian people about the role of the Indian in celebration of the bicentennial” (35). Tate writes, “As a member of the Chickasaw Nation, I see no reason to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the United States.” He goes on, however, to place the colonial anniversary within a broader analysis of the history of democracy and justice:

The political theorists who gave birth to the nation, of “a government of laws, not of men,” are still searching for a home. The history of this nation’s treatment of the aboriginal peoples also serves as a summary of the attitudes and the political posture which this country has assumed towards all its citizens, Indians and non-Indians alike. (35)

Anticipating 1976, Tate remarks further, “It is a truly amazing phenomenon that so many tribes have survived and today maintain a strong sense of ‘Indianness,’ which is difficult to define but exists nonetheless” (35).

Not surprisingly, the two national American Indian newspapers published during the mid-1970s, Akwesasne Notes, produced by the Mohawk nation in upstate New York, and Wassaja, produced by the American Indian Historical Society in California, printed articles, letters, advertisements, and occasionally poems that anticipate the bicentennial. In its January/February 1975 issue, for instance, Wassaja published “Indians and the U.S. Bicentennial,” an overview that rehearses issues similar to those debated during the 1973 conference and details a number of Native community projects that had already received federal funding (18). In the April 1975 issue, Ken Powlas, author of the regular column “The Beat of Dissent,” published “The Bicentennial Celebration of Independence Day: Another Beat” (11). He describes his column as a transcript of an invited speech he gave, on a “Topic of Controversy of the Day,” to “a group of white business men, whom I can best describe almost to the man as ‘Red, White and Blue Patriots.’”¹⁹ For his white audience, Powlas lists the many reasons why Indians might choose not to celebrate the bicentennial—a history of genocide, land loss, broken treaties—and then asks, “What Indian pride can be engendered for your American Heritage?” He concludes by anticipating a possible, better, distant future: “Perhaps, by your 400th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, if there are any of us left, the Great Spirit will have seen fit for the surviving tribes to have an Independence of their own to celebrate, daily, not once a year or every century in the hereafter.” The June 1975 issue includes a letter from Wilson W. Wolf Jr. that echoes the sentiment of AIM and other activists: “Why not stage our own Indian celebration to coincide with the 4th of July festivity! When a glorious victory of June 28, 1876 [sic] was scored at the Little Big Horn. It will be the centennial of that important date” (13). In the August 1975 issue, Wassaja reports that AIM is establishing “truth squads” to “protest bicentennial celebrations across the nation.” While the newspaper cannot confirm the story, the anonymous columnist notes, “There seems to be no doubt that the Indian people are divided on the issue of the Bicentennial, and that most individual Indians have expressed disapproval of the various events being planned for the celebrations” (6).

At least one poem published in Wassaja anticipates the settler celebration of 1976 and seems to embrace the ideal of AIM’s rumored truth squads. “Bicentennial” by the novelist and scholar Michael Dorris (Modoc) appears in the issue dated September 20, 1975. Divided into side-by-side columns, the poem is organized as a settler call and Indigenous response. The first part presents an Indian view of how the dominant culture, designated “You,” attempts to set the terms for how Indigenous peoples are allowed to respond to the bicentennial:

You say:

It’s your bicentennial too.

No party-poopers allowed.

Where else such presents?

Union Pacific cards and

Hand-forged iron(s).

A niche in history and

Boy Scout shadows,

Taco tias in every town.

Don’t forget:

You have no dates!

Your calendars

Are in our museums

Unflipped in crumbly stone.

This is your only anniversary:

Would you make a noise

In the forest,

If you fell unheard by us?

In Dorris’s vision of bicentennial “truth,” the dominant culture attempts to erase Indigenous peoples and their counterclaims to histories outside the U.S. nation-state not through exclusion but through a forceful inclusion. Settler discourses deny the possibility of ongoing American Indian distinctiveness or, ironically—given the reverence for a revolutionary Spirit of ’76—American Indian independence. The second part of the poem imagines a collective Indigenous response to the demand for inclusion and compliance. Echoing AIM and other activists, the collective speaker responds to the dominant “You”:

Stay cool: we’ll blow out

Your candles, one by one.

Of course we celebrate:

Two hundred years is

Two hundred years less.

Your Centennial was marked

At the Little Big Horn, and

We may even commemorate 1776

After you’ve long gone.

Better not to forget

In order to remember.

Let’s join hands

In looking back.

While Hopi prophets ghost dance

All night, till dawn.

(10)

Similar to participants at the 1973 conference, Dorris embraces the bicentennial theme of celebrating the past while building toward the future, but with an Indigenous focus and articulation that the dominant culture appears unable to imagine and never to have anticipated.

Dorris was not the only Native author to engage the upcoming bicentennial in poetry published in 1975. That year saw the publication of the anthology Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians, edited by Kenneth Rosen, which includes “Discovery of the New World” by Carter Revard (Osage) (99–101).²⁰ Revard’s celebrated poem deploys the futuristic discourse of science fiction and an Indigenous dark humor: his speakers are space aliens reporting back to their leader as they systematically colonize the Earth, consume its resources, and destroy its inhabitants. The poem has been read as a general meditation on European conquest, as well as a critique of Manifest Destiny. Since the 1990s, it has been viewed, as well, as a predecessor to Gerald Vizenor’s 1991 comic novel, The Heirs of Columbus, which anticipates the events of 1992, and other works that respond to the quincentenary.²¹ A number of details suggest Revard’s poem also anticipates 1976.

When the aliens report, “Their history bled from one [human] this morning / while we were tasting his brain / in holographic rainbows / which we assembled into quite an interesting / set of legends,” the specific references are not to Columbus or Cortez or other European colonizers but rather to “a certain General Sherman.” The ironically named William Tecumseh Sherman served as a general in the Union army during the Civil War and as commanding general of the army from 1869 to 1883, during the height of the U.S. assault on Plains Indian nations. Those years included the U.S. centennial and the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. As he had in the Civil War, in the wars against Indian nations Sherman sought to destroy not only armed combatants but entire communities and their resources—it is this history that is evoked in the aliens’ report to the mothership. Moreover, the concluding lines echo the language of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Looking ahead to their own near future, the aliens anticipate: “We’ll soon have it [the Earth] cleared / as in fact it is already, at the poles, / Then we will be safe, and rich, and happy here forever.” Manifest Destiny, an ideal of 1876, will finally reach its ultimate conclusion.

A surprising number of American Indians from diverse backgrounds expressed their anticipations of the bicentennial in print.²² Three more will suffice to set the stage for the novel-length anticipations of Nasnaga and Smith discussed later. On the eve of the bicentennial year, in its November/December 1975 issue, Wassaja published “Bicentennial Perspectives” by Dorothy Davids (Stockbridge-Munsee), “an Indian specialist” at the University of Wisconsin Extension Center for Community Leadership Development and chairperson of the Stockbridge-Munsee Museum Commission.²³ Davids responds to the bicentennial as a member of an Indigenous nation that “fought in the American Revolution” in 1776 and lost lives in that conflict. She asks, “What liberty and justice did the Stockbridge people enjoy [for their sacrifice]?” Her answer is a brief history of how the Stockbridge-Munsee “lost most of [their] language and culture” and “lost [their] land.” What the Stockbridge-Munsee do have to celebrate in 1976, Davids argues, is that in 1972, by an act of Congress, the tribe finally realized a stable land base, and in the few years since, they have “established a research library and museum.” “In this way,” she writes, “we Stockbridge are celebrating our survival, our self-determination and a growing awareness of our identity as a People.” She concludes with a promising anticipation, an Indigenous revision of Byrd’s idea of a “continuing American revolution”: “The Native American Revolution, bringing liberty and justice, may just be beginning” (5; emphasis added).²⁴

Other commentators felt similarly that their nations’ specific histories of interaction, struggle, and ongoing engagement with the United States uniquely qualified them to reflect on the ideal of a “continuing American revolution.” On January 7, 1975, Peter MacDonald, governor of the Navajo Nation, stated a version of his people’s understanding of American ideals during his inaugural address:

As the United States moves forward to celebrate its Bicentennial, we find that too many Americans have forgotten both the importance and the price of freedom. We find they have forgotten the days when America itself was an emerging nation. To the Navajo, however, the struggle for freedom goes on. [. . .]

For many Americans, the struggle for freedom is only history. For us, however, it is a continuing part, not only of our heritage, but of our daily lives. We, like our parents and grandparents before us, have battled for our survival against extermination—termination—and assimilation.

Because our struggles are so recent and, in fact, because they continue, we alone, perhaps among all Americans[,] appreciate how truly precious and truly rare freedom is. (214)

MacDonald’s refusal to embrace the easy slogans of dominant forms of U.S. nationalism and his insistence, instead, on characterizing “the struggle for freedom” as an ongoing process relevant to all peoples and not simply as a completed chapter in a heroic U.S. history resonate across Indigenous anticipations of 1976.

Although such responses do not appear in the book-length works published by Deloria in 1973 or 1974, his essays and presentations in 1975 offer some of the most intellectually savvy engagements with the upcoming bicentennial from the period. In February 1975, for example, Deloria delivered “The American Revolution and the American Indian: Problems in the Recovery of a Usable Past” at a two-day conference on “The American Indian and the American Revolution” held at the Newberry Library in Chicago.²⁵ In November 1975, he published “Why Indians Aren’t Celebrating the Bicentennial” in the education journal Learning. In the Newberry presentation, Deloria introduces his analysis of relevant colonial history:

The frightening thing about the celebrations of the bicentennial is that we are tempted to simply increase the velocity with which we manipulate the familiar symbols of our past without coming to grips with a more profound understanding of our history. Things have probably been much better and much worse than we can imagine, and it is only when we enter the arena of discussion of American Indians and the American Revolution that we can determine just how polarized the events of American history have been. (206)

He concludes his cogent analysis:

The American Indian has an intimate relationship to the American Revolution because, of all the peoples in the world, the American Indians have had to bear the impact of the criminality of the United States and to attempt to soften its impact on the rest of the world. In biblical terms, American Indians have had to be the suffering servant for the planet; their role has been to change the American conception of a society from that of a complex of laws designed to protect property to one in which liberty is not a matter of laws, coercive power, or a shadow of government but is characterized by manners and a moral sense of right and wrong. (221)

Rather than accept the assigned role of either “noble” or “savage” victim, Deloria reclaims Indigenous agency on both the national and the global stage.

In his essay, Deloria stresses the contemporary context for the bicentennial, in which, on the one hand, Indian activists “consider themselves to be at war” with the United States and, on the other, “most Indians do not presently know what their relationship to the United States really is” (200). He explores, too, the dysfunctional nature of ongoing Indigenous–settler relations, in which well-meaning non-Indians seek out and invite Indians to celebrate the past and, inadvertently, “simply reinforce the cycle of emotional hurt” (205). In response, Deloria argues, “We should be celebrating the goals of the next hundred years instead of the failures and successes of the past two hundred.” To move beyond these cycles of dysfunction, moreover, “we should be making a determined effort to move forward in the creation of a continental culture that understands itself as a totality and a novelty whose only concern is developing forms of existence that provide everyone involved with a sense of integrity and identity” (205; emphasis added). As we shall see, however, in contrast to this ecumenical vision, the novelists who envisioned a future 1976 in which Indigenous peoples either maintain or regain “a sense of integrity and dignity” had very different ideas about who should determine the culture(s) of the North American continent.

At least one book-length work of Native fiction explicitly anticipates the U.S. bicentennial. Published in 1975, Indians’ Summer by Nasnaga (Roger Russell) was the fourth selection in Harper and Row’s short-lived Native American Publishing Program.²⁶ Long out of print, this novel of militant activism has fallen out of most studies of Native American literature. Moreover, little is known about its author. According to the novel’s dust jacket:

Nasnaga was born April 13, 1941, in Dayton, Ohio. He is a member of the Shawnee Nation, United Remnant Band. The Remnant Band is composed of predominantly mixed-blood Shawnees who are actively working to restore and reinvigorate the traditional way of life of their people.²⁷ Nasnaga grew up in Ohio, and then moved to Texas in 1968 after serving a hitch in the United States Navy. An artist, he has supported himself both from his paintings and by working as a draftsman. This is his first novel.

In the author’s photo a serious-looking Nasnaga is dressed in “traditional” Shawnee regalia.²⁸

Although published in 1975, Indians’ Summer is set during 1976 in the period between June 27—the centennial of the immediate aftermath of the 1876 Indian victory at the Little Bighorn—and September 5—the anniversary of both the assembly of the First Continental Congress in 1775 and the death of the Lakota visionary and war chief Crazy Horse in 1887—with action concentrated on the Fourth of July and the days immediately following. The importance of the bicentennial and the idea of armed revolution are emphasized immediately in the artwork created by Nasnaga for the dust jacket. Against a black background, the Declaration of Independence dominates the cover. The parchment-colored document, with “In Congress” and “July 4, 1776” inked prominently across the top, has been pierced through its “heart” by a painted and feathered arrow. Blood pools around the fresh wound and streams through the document’s discourse of liberation and the signature of John Hancock. The novel’s title appears in all caps above the declaration in a bold block print the same color as the blood, with “a novel by Nasnaga” placed immediately below the title in a smaller typeface the same color as the parchment. This color symbolism is repeated in the hardback edition’s construction: front and back boards are the color of parchment; front and back endpapers are a bright blood red.

Before the narrative begins, Nasnaga sets the tone for his story and indicates a primary source of inspiration with an epigraph from the activist Vernon Bellecourt (Ojibwe), who is identified as “International Field Director, American Indian Movement.” Originally published in Penthouse Magazine in July 1973, Bellecourt’s statement predates the reorganization of the ARBC as the ARBA and Warner’s work to actively consult with Indigenous communities:

A bicentennial celebration is going to take place in 1976. We, the hosts, haven’t been asked about our involvement. We feel that if this government is expecting to celebrate its two hundredth birthday in our country, they’d better involve us. . . . Unless the conditions change one hundred eighty degrees, it will be our duty and our responsibility to blow out the candles on the two hundredth birthday cake.²⁹

Bellecourt’s identity as Ojibwe (also known as Chippewa and Anishinaabe) will turn out to be significant to Nasnaga’s conception of Indian activism and unity. The title and copyright pages contain more artwork by Nasnaga, with additional examples placed throughout: line drawings of feathered roaches and headdresses, decorated shields, coup sticks, tomahawks, knives, and, at the end of the novel, a pipe. Nasnaga dedicates his work to “the Indian People” and to his daughter, acknowledges those who helped make its publication possible, and provides a glossary of sixteen “words in this book that probably won’t be familiar to many readers” (n.p.).

Finally, on the last unnumbered page before the narrative, Nasnaga prints an untitled poem that picks up on Bellecourt’s Anishinaabe identity and foreshadows the novel’s theme of collective action. Similar to McNickle’s 1973 anticipation of “integrating tribal people,” Nasnaga reconciles the complexity of tribal diversity with a vision of Indian unity. In the brief poem reconciliation is accomplished through the evocative imagery of “dust devils”:

The buffalo grass is still.

Dust devils die from neglect.

I know how they feel.

I am Indian.

Like unborn dust devils

I wait for a fresh breeze.

It comes. Dust devils are born.

I listen. I learn. I grow strong.

I am Indian.

A body of many parts

Scattered to the four winds.

My mouth speaks in many tongues.

Like dust devils, all are the whole.

I am Anishinabe!

Part of the poem’s activist energy arises from the term “dust devils,” which charges natural phenomena with the colonialist Christian binary that marked Indigenous peoples as “red devils.” The speaker’s description of “scattered” parts functioning as a “whole” anticipates a major plot element of the novel, as does the movement from an exclusively English declaration, “I am Indian,” to an emphatic bilingual declaration, “I am Anishinabe!” In his glossary Nasnaga defines “Anishinabe” as “an Algonkian word meaning The People.”³⁰ Following McNickle’s lead, the speaker declares his movement from isolated individual to powerfully collective voice.

Nasnaga divides the 195 pages of his narrative into part 1, “What Indians?,” and part 2, “‘Hail to the Chief’ Sounds Like Hell on Drums!” Each part is preceded by an epigraph from a nineteenth-century Sioux leader, and each is further divided into a total of forty-one unnumbered chapters. Rather than a title, each brief chapter is headed by a designation of a specific place, date, and time. The fragmented structure and the emphasis on location in space and time, combined with the concise, unembellished style of Nasnaga’s prose, create a journalistic quality and a sense of on-the-spot news reports or immediate updates as the action unfolds.³¹ The novel’s plot can be summarized briefly. After a period of planning, on July 4, 1976, the Navajo, Sioux, Mohawk, Apache, and Pueblo nations unite as the Anishinabe-waki Democracy, which Nasnaga defines as “Algonkian for Land of the People, or simply, Indian country,” and declare their independence from the United States. This new, multitribal, geographically dispersed Indigenous nation is led by Joel Turning Hawk, great-grandson of John Captures Many Horses, the last living Sioux war chief with genealogical ties to the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn (through his father) and the 1866 Battle of the Hundred Slain (through his grandfather).³² Turning Hawk thus represents a sixth-generation war chief who will prepare the way for the seventh generation’s freedom from U.S. oppression. The Anishinabe, as members of the new nation refer to themselves, are enabled in their coordinated military maneuvers in the Southwest, on the northern plains, and on the U.S.–Canadian border in the northeast by the fact that so many of their men are either active in the National Guard or ex-servicemen from the war in Vietnam, including paratroopers and special forces veterans, as well as by the fact that the United States has posted the abundance of its troops in West Germany to oppose mounting Soviet forces. Focused on the Cold War abroad, the United States is taken completely by surprise at home. The Anishinabe easily control large sections of Arizona and New Mexico, the Dakotas, and northern New York.

The Anishinabe also attack the United States along the diplomatic front. Their emissary Roy Bear Walks Backward has spent two years working with the consulate of India—in an obvious play on the (mis)naming of peoples in the Americas—to prepare the way for formally declaring both independence and war from within the forum of the United Nations. India presents the Anishinabe manifesto to the UN General Assembly, which is received, to the dismay of the U.S. president, with less-than-subtle glee by the USSR and others eager to challenge U.S. power. The United States is placed in an embarrassing public relations position and in a situation of almost impossible diplomacy. Faced with similar problems, the Canadian prime minister takes his own life. The president does not resort to self-violence but moves steadily toward alignment with his principal military adviser, who argues that the Indians must be destroyed and quickly. They contemplate the use of limited nuclear weapons—and the possibility of a third world war—rather than recognize Indigenous sovereignty. Led by Edward Small Wolf, Turning Hawk’s cousin and a U.S. congressman who rediscovers his Indian loyalty during the crisis, the Anishinabe offer a last-minute diplomatic solution that recognizes the sovereignty of Anishinabe-waki while allowing the United States to save face internationally. The United States responds with a demand for full surrender and the threat of immediate military action, and Small Wolf is forced to play the Anishinabe trump card: he informs the president that the Minuteman missiles siloed deep in the Dakota plains have been reprogrammed to fire on Washington, DC. U.S. antimissile technology, designed to intercept foreign missiles only, will not respond; the capital will be destroyed. When the president finally relents, readers learn what they may already have suspected: Small Wolf bluffed, and unlike the United States, the Anishinabe never entertained a doomsday scenario. The bicentennial festivities resume, but they resume with the celebration, as well, of “the birth of a new nation” (193).

The handful of reviews Indians’ Summer received in 1975 are decidedly mixed. The reviewer for Booklist assumes Nasnaga’s “seriocomic” and “provocative” novel is intended only for “older teenagers” rather than a broad audience.³³ The reviewer for Virginia Quarterly Review is openly hostile to the “ludicrously contrived fantasy” of a plot about “American Indians supposedly getting even for their history”; he argues that Nasnaga “never transcends the level of mere ethnocentric propaganda.”³⁴ In a brief review for Library Journal, Anne Freling of the Mt. Pleasant Public Library in Michigan describes Nasnaga’s premise as “interesting” but argues that Indians’ Summer is “essentially a one-concept novel.”³⁵ Writing for the newly created American Indian Quarterly, Lawrence Evers offers a more balanced review, stating that the novel is “simple and timely” and that Nasnaga “gives us synoptic commentaries on contemporary militant American Indian politics and endless homilies on American Indian world view.”³⁶ The most sympathetic reviews were published in the Christian Science Monitor and the New Republic. Although Robert M. Press begins his review like the former ones, “Of course it is not likely to happen,” he later confesses, “You put [the novel] down for awhile, saying it could not happen, but you sneak back to see how it turns out.” Press is the only reviewer to note that 1976 is “the 100th anniversary of the United States cavalry’s annihilation at the battle of the Little Bighorn,” suggesting that this is a relevant context.³⁷ The New Republic offers the most extensive review as well as the most positive. Its writer is identified only as “a fiction-reading correspondent, CH”—suggesting the initials of the nineteenth-century Lakota war chief Crazy Horse, whom Nasnaga quotes in his epigraph to part 1 and whom this reviewer quotes at the very end of his piece. CH is the only reviewer who places Nasnaga’s plot within a broader bicentennial perspective. He (or she) writes, “Those who find the idea of Indians attempting to regain part of the US far-fetched should remember what led the American colonies’ revolt against George III.” Farther into the review, CH writes, “But now, in this fiction, we see [American Indians] as they are once again[,] dignified, seeking to correct past injustices. Indians’ Summer is not written in anger, but as a warning, a prophecy perhaps.”³⁸

In his 1978 study American Indian Fiction, Charles R. Larson engages Indians’ Summer in a brief “Coda” to chapter 6, “Survivors of the Relocation,” in which he analyzes “the most recently published novels” by American Indians.³⁹ Unlike the early reviewers, who either miss or downplay the novel’s elements of satire (especially in its portrayal of the president and his advisers, who bear historically significant names such as General Sherman and Colonel Jackson), Larson initially describes Indians’ Summer as a “satirical spoof” as well as a “fantasy” (161, 162). Rather than develop this genre criticism, though, he quickly turns to how the narrative operates as “rhetoric—written, it appears, as a reaction to the 1973 Wounded Knee confrontation (which is referred to several times)” (162). Larson argues that “the potential force known as Pan-Indianism” is a “major theme” of the novel and that Nasnaga “proclaims the need for inter-tribal cohesion if Native Americans are ever to regain control over their collective destiny” (163, 164). It is true that Indians’ Summer refers to the events in South Dakota in spring 1973 at least six times. Early in the novel, for example, “the Wounded Knee affair in 1973” is used by Native characters to mark when “the longstanding undercurrent of racism [against Indians] began rising to the surface” (10) and, in a symmetrical contrast, by the U.S. president to mark recent Indian protest (30). In the second half of the novel, readers learn that Turning Hawk “did not particularly care for the way the [American Indian] Movement had handled itself in 1973. He felt Wounded Knee had been a waste of lives, especially since the American people hadn’t given a damn about a few dead Indians” (128). Most significantly, Turning Hawk asserts, “The idea of an Indian nation had not been born at Wounded Knee that long spring in 1973”; rather, “the 1973 incident had made some people start thinking in the right direction” (129). Although never mentioned explicitly, however, the autumn 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties caravan, which culminated in an occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, is equally as important a context for understanding how Nasnaga anticipates the bicentennial. Moreover, attention to the novel’s consistent engagement with the broader discourse of treaties helps explicate Nasnaga’s vision of an Indigenous future marked by intertribal solidarity rather than by what Larson calls the “potential force” of “Pan-Indianism.”⁴⁰

A number of Native publications followed the Trail of Broken Treaties. Best known is Deloria’s 1974 Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. A year earlier, Akwesasne Notes published Trail of Broken Treaties: B.I.A. I’m Not Your Indian Anymore.⁴¹ Both help contextualize the premise of Nasnaga’s novel, as well as its narrative tactics and symbolism. In its introduction, for instance, Akwesasne Notes describes the cross-country caravan and occupation of the BIA headquarters as “one of the most serious attacks upon the United States Government on its own turf since the British sacked Washington during the war of 1812.” Similarly, Nasnaga imagines Indians uniting across the continent to attack the United States “on its own turf” in Washington, DC, and on turf the United States sometimes considers its own, the United Nations in New York City. In addition, Akwesasne Notes highlights its decision to present the events of 1972 “in day-by-day reports as [they] happened, rather than as a past-tense report”; Nasnaga also divides his novel into “day-by-day reports.” Akwesasne Notes concludes its introduction, “Thus this book contains history—and future” (iv). Nasnaga juxtaposes his plot set in the near future with highly charged epigraphs from nineteenth-century Sioux leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, while several of his characters consider a history of resistance to U.S. and European forces that begins not in 1976 or 1876 or even 1776 but in 1676 with the war waged against invading colonists by the leader of the Wampanoag Confederacy known to the English as King Philip (130). In a significant anticipatory scene, Small Wolf, the Sioux diplomat, awakens from a dream set “somewhere on the High Plains—Land of the Lakota Nation . . . Circa 1870” that prefigures the nuclear showdown with the United States as a conflict between the cavalry armed with repeating rifles and a lone Lakota armed with metal-pointed arrows (153–54).

Following its introduction, as an epigraph to Trail of Broken Treaties, Akwesasne Notes quotes Eddie Benton, who paraphrases “a prophecy in our Ojibway religion, that one day we would all stand together. All tribes would hook arms in brotherhood and unite.” Benton remarks, “I am elated because I lived to see this happen. Brothers and sisters from all over the continent were united in a single cause. That is the greatest significance to Indian people—not what happened or what yet may happen as a result of our actions” (1). Nasnaga’s anticipatory plot is based on a similar fulfillment of the Ojibwe—Anishinaabe—prophecy. Akwesasne Notes also alludes to historical attempts to create Indian unity that may have had particular resonance for Nasnaga as Shawnee. Trail of Broken Treaties is framed by a quotation attributed to Tecumseh (1768–1813), the martyred Shawnee leader from what is now Ohio who lived through the American Revolution in 1776 and who, with the help of his younger brother, the prophet Tenskwatawa, attempted to unite Indians into a confederation from which to resist the encroaching United States.⁴² The repeated quotation from Tecumseh includes this statement: “Unless each tribe unanimously combines to give check to the avarice and oppressions of the whites, we will become conquered and disunited and we will be driven from our Native Lands and scattered like Autumn leaves before the wind” (2). Although Nasnaga never refers directly to Tecumseh, the “dust devil” imagery of his untitled poem—“A body of many parts / Scattered to the four winds”—reworks the above quotation. In addition, Nasnaga creates a minor but significant character who identifies as Shawnee. As the narrative builds toward its climax, Turning Hawk is interrupted in his thinking by “a light-skinned young man” whose “eyes were gray” and whose “shoulder-length hair was brown.” When the young man says that he has “come from my [vision] quest,” Turning Hawk asks, “Are you Lakota? I do not know your face though you appear as they say our Strange One did” (165). The young man replies, “No, my Chief, though I do know of Crazy Horse. I am Shawnee.” The young man identifies himself as “Maka Meen-de-gah,” which Nasnaga translates as “Shawnee for Black Owl,” and says that he has brought Turning Hawk news from his quest: “He [the spirit being] said he had seen the People. They were many . . . as many as before. They would follow and soon to this land would come peace. We would be as we were. We would be the People” (166). Thus, Nasnaga not only aligns his apparently mixed-blood Shawnee character with the historical Lakota visionary and warrior Crazy Horse but with a vision of the future similar to that proposed by the Shawnee warrior Tecumseh and his prophet brother. In this way Nasnaga inserts his subject position as mixed-blood Shawnee into the narrative and into an anticipated Indigenous future.

This scene is of interest, as well, for the specific terms of its prophecy. “We would be as we were” suggests “the People” will be diverse and multitribal rather than homogenous and “pan-Indian.” Indeed, the novel consistently balances its “rhetoric” of unity with an emphasis on multitribal diversity. Scenes are set among Indians in New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, New York, and Canada, and characters identify as Navajo, Sioux, Mohawk, Apache, Acoma, Osage, Hopi, Cheyenne, Sac-Fox, and Shawnee. The Anishinabe-waki Democracy is not a single entity but a federation of three “new states”: Cabolclo (located in New Mexico and defined by Nasnaga as “a Tupi-Guarani word meaning copper colored”), Lakota (“the name of the western, or Teton division of the Sioux nation”), and Akwesasne (“the Mohawk name for their reservation, officially known as St. Regis, which spans the St. Lawrence River in the United States and Canada”) (49).⁴³ The American Indians’ connection to the Asian nation of India, which offers Anishinabe-waki diplomatic support, is explained not only in terms of their common bond of oppression “at the hands of the white man who brought his so-called civilization to the poor, backward natives” but, more significantly, in these terms: “Both nations were characterized by cultures within cultures, many racial types within one people, and by languages and dialects which differed completely within only a few miles of each other” (126). In other words, similar to historical India, Nasnaga’s imagined future Anishinabe-waki remains diversely multitribal.

Throughout the narrative, moreover, characters refer to treaties between Indian nations and settler governments in the United States and Canada. When the consul for India delivers his speech before the UN, he describes how “the trust [the Indians] placed in the government of the United States has been rewarded with over four hundred broken treaties” (77). He invokes this history again during an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council (121). During one of the president’s tense meetings with his military and civilian advisers, between “large belt[s] of scotch,” a senator evokes both the stereotypes and the political force of the discourse of treaties:

“‘As long as the grass grows and the river flows . . . etc., etc., etc.!’ Mr. President, how do you ‘deal’ with a people you’ve lied to and murdered for five hundred years? I think they’d rather have smallpox than our promises. We gave them both and it’s hard to say which was more deadly!” [. . .]

“If we get cornered into trying to make all those old treaties good, we’ll end up with Plymouth Rock, and damn lucky to hold that!” (94)

As the novel moves toward conclusion the Indian nation asserts its sovereignty, in part, by negotiating treaties with the Canadian province of Quebec and with the nation-states of France and Mexico (170). These are negotiated at Akwesasne, in the heart of the Iroquois confederacy, a model of intertribal organization and unity without loss of tribal distinctiveness or autonomy.

Five years before Nasnaga published Indians’ Summer, another mixed-blood novelist anticipated a future 1976 in which American Indians retain a substantial land base and wield substantial political as well as cultural sovereignty, including the specific power to negotiate treaties. Martin Cruz Smith has since become a celebrated author of political thrillers and mysteries; in 1970, he was a young journalist and struggling writer of fiction. The Indians Won, which he wrote in 1969, when Indian activists were beginning to make their voices heard on a national scale, was his first published novel.⁴⁴ Similar to Indians’ Summer in its anticipation of 1976, The Indians Won explores the possibilities of a unity among diverse American Indian individuals, communities, and nations that is both expansive and effective. Unlike Nasnaga, however, who sets his novel entirely in an imagined near future with only occasional references to the past, Smith imagines a highly detailed, alternative history that begins with the major battles fought between Plains Indian nations and the U.S. cavalry in the nineteenth century. In Smith’s alternative version, the 1876 defeat of Custer at the Little Bighorn no longer represents the Indians’ final military victory, nor the beginning of the end of independent Indian nations. Rather, that battle represents the beginning of a movement among the Sioux and their historical allies toward a stronger unity among themselves and, as they gain power, between themselves and other, more distant Indigenous nations. The defeat of Custer is also the beginning of the Indians’ full realization of their sovereignty. Defying expectations of both the United States, against whom they fight, and the European powers, from whom they receive assistance, Smith’s nineteenth-century Indians develop an Indigenous nation-state.

The bulk of the novel details this alternative history in a faux-documentary style. Smith’s protagonist in these sections is John Setter (also known as Where the Sun Goes), a well-educated, well-traveled, and well-connected Mandan who enlists the Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka in his efforts to persuade Indians to unite as a single force to resist the cavalry on the plains and the broader U.S. settler encroachment onto Indian lands. Following a brief prologue set in 1875, prior to the central action of 1876 and its aftermath, Smith divides each of his six chapters between his alternative history centered on Setter and on his alternative present of the 1970s. In these less developed sections, Smith’s protagonist is Holds Eagles, a prominent diplomat for the now century-old Indian Nation. The diplomat’s contemporary mission is to negotiate with the president of the United States—a nation no longer contiguous across the continent but straddling the sovereign Indian Nation in eastern and western branches—in order to avert a looming war over national borders. As in the past, the United States desires more Indian land. Similar to Indians’ Summer, the drama of these sections of The Indians Won revolves around the possibility of a nuclear conflict between the United States and the smaller but equally armed Indian Nation.

Although Smith never specifies the date, details suggest the present of The Indians Won is the “now” of its first readers. Cover art for the paperback edition indicates that this “now” is more precisely the near future of 1976. Positioned above and below the title, the artwork depicts two sides of a commemorative medal. On one side, the bust of a Sioux warrior is flanked by the years 1876 and 1976, with the caption “Red Shirt Indian Nation.”⁴⁵ Emblazoned on the other, above two crossed Indian staffs, are the words “Commemorating Victory At Little Big Horn, Which Led To The Founding Of The Indian Nation.” The medal counterbalances the U.S. bicentennial with an imagined Indian Nation centennial. The synopsis on the back cover emphasizes the relationship between the multiply significant 1876 and this “now”:

THE YEAR IS 1876. The United States has just suffered its third successive Indian defeat at the Custer massacre. The Presidency has been stolen in the country’s worst political scandal. In the midst of economic depression, violence erupts and mobs control the cities. All this is in your history book. Now, what if the Indians won?

THE TIME IS NOW. The United States straddles a vast unconquered Red Nation. For the first time in a hundred years the long unguarded borders are threatened. The Indians have the bomb. Indian sympathizers in the United States are called Pinkos. The President is terrified. The CIA is in stalemate.

It is unclear whether Smith was aware of the activist invasion of Alcatraz Island in late 1969 when he wrote his anticipatory novel, and The Indians Won was published before the subsequent large-scale activist events of 1972 and 1973.⁴⁶ Nonetheless, similar to Nasnaga, Smith honors a pre-1876 history of attempts to create Indian unity through a minor character identified as Shawnee (174). His most arresting plot innovation, however, is that he imagines a coming 1976 in which the political and racial violence of the 1960s culminates in the assassination of the leader of the American Indian nation. In his faux-documentary style, Smith delivers the recent history of this near future in the voice of a U.S. reporter for the “education network”:

The waves of violence that began growing in the Sixties seem about to engulf us. The assassination of a President and of a candidate for President, the war in Vietnam, student protests and, this year, the assassination of the Indian Chief of Nations, Buffalo Rider, by an American, all of these events seem to be accelerating to some sort of terrible crescendo. (63–64)

The Indian diplomat Holds Eagles turns out to be the newly elected Chief of Nations to replace Buffalo Rider, and despite attempts by corrupt U.S. officials to divert him from high-level talks and to frame him for murder, he successfully begins the negotiation of a new treaty with the U.S. president, averting the imminent threat of a nuclear exchange. In the novel’s final scene, Smith has the president anticipate his nation’s relationship with the Indians in the coming Century III: “The next hundred years will see vast changes on the continent we share. We must meet the challenges of those changes together. We must change, too” (218). Offering tobacco, the Indian Chief of Nations anticipates his own nation’s Century II and agrees.

The anticipatory plots of Nasnaga’s and Smith’s fictions share an emphasis on the recurrent nature of crises in Indigenous–settler relations rather than on any linear progression, as well as on the ongoing difficulties in creating effective channels for Indigenous–settler negotiation. In this way, Nasnaga and Smith expand McNickle’s and Deloria’s nonfiction anticipations of a complex but increasingly sovereign Indigenous near future. In all four visions McNickle’s “integrated” tribes continually work and rework their relations of power among themselves and with the United States. And both novelists, similar to participants in the American Indian Bicentennial Conference, assert the sovereign right of American Indians to prioritize their own needs and their own standards as they negotiate political authority and shared responsibilities. Rather than fantasy utopias of Indigenous isolation from the settler nation, they anticipate far more pragmatic—and far more likely—futures of Indigenous–settler interdependence.

During the bicentennial year itself, the national American Indian newspapers published articles, editorials, letters, and poems that further detail the multiple Indigenous responses to the Spirit of ’76. In its July issue, for example, Wassaja published the brief article “Bicentennial” by Thomas Dion (Houma). Taking a hard line against the ideology undergirding the U.S. festivities, Dion asks, “What does this [celebration] mean to an Indian?” He answers, “What it does is remind us of the lands that we lost; of the schools we never had; and the hatred, bigotry and animosity felt for us for so many years!” (3). In the same issue, Wassaja published “‘Be Thankful’: The Bicentennial,” focused on the views of Charles Trimble, executive director of the NCAI and a keynote speaker at the Bicentennial Conference. The anonymous reporter describes Trimble as promoting the idea that “the Indian should join the bicentennial celebration, but be thankful for survival.” Repeating views he expressed in Tucson in 1973, Trimble emphasizes the need for effective tribal leadership in order to produce a more successful Indian future:

American Indians have a long way to go to achieve their independence, but they must move toward this goal by participating in tribal government and by learning leadership, Trimble said. “With it the next 200 years will certainly be better for the Indian than the last 200 years [. . .].” (6)

Similar ideas were expressed by John C. Rainer, chairman of the board of regents for the Institute of American Indian Arts in the commencement address he delivered to the IAIA graduating class on May 21. Rainer describes himself and the students as “Natives of this country, with a rich and proud background.” Aware of that history, he asks his audience to consider their place in a contemporary United States. “For the non-Indian graduates of 1976,” he states, “there are many challenges to question, correct and make improvement on the establishment.” In contrast, he argues, “For the Indian graduates, the burden of challenges to retain, maintain, correct and improve the whole question of Indian Affairs appears difficult and almost insurmountable” (220). Part of the context for Indigenous peoples is the demographic fact that “over half of the entire national Indian population is composed of Indians 27 years and younger.” Thus, Rainer tells the IAIA graduates, “you are the vanguard” (221). His conclusion echoes Trimble in its emphasis on “the dire need for well trained Indian men and women who can and will be the future leaders in tribal and community affairs” (224).

Wassaja also published poetry voicing Native intellectual, psychological, and emotional responses to the bicentennial.⁴⁷ The June 1976 issue features a poem by R. Houle, “200 Years,” that rehearses the violence of Indian–settler contact but ends with a focus on the future:

Some day I hope we all can be free.

Right now, Ward of the Gov., that’s me.

For sure, my spirit, they’ll never own or claim,

Not even after the Owl calls my name.

(2)

In addition to the articles discussed above, the July 1976 issue features a poem by Patricia Eagle Elk, also titled “Bicentennial.” Similar to the article by Dion, Eagle Elk’s poem is written in the voice of critical satire:

For your genocidal heroes,

For the treaties you never honored,

For your freedom and democracy,

Happy Birthday, America.

In the final stanza, Eagle Elk evokes possibilities similar to those explored in the anticipatory novels by Nasnaga and Smith:

Ring your bell of liberty

And proclaim freedom and democracy.

We have heard you for hundreds of years.

Are you indivisible . . .

And are we the Native people so invisible?

(3)

Two of the era’s most celebrated Native intellectuals and writers, Deloria and Momaday, were each invited to offer “the” American Indian response to the bicentennial in the pages of major periodicals. Deloria was asked to write for a special Fourth of July issue of the New York Times Magazine titled “America at 200.” His is one of fifteen articles that offer perspectives on the present and future of the settler nation.⁴⁸ Published under the ironic heading “The Ex-Majority,” Deloria’s article bears the evocative title “A Last Word from the First Americans.” In the center of the full-page article, an artist for the magazine has altered a photograph of the National Mall in Washington, DC, replacing the iconic Washington Monument with a massive flint arrowhead.⁴⁹ With characteristic humor, Deloria deflates the importance of the young nation-state’s two hundred years by noting, first, “Most traditional medicine men have sacred drums, pipes and wampum that are nearly twice that age, so the white man’s concept of longevity is not really bowling people over on the reservations,” and, second, “Perhaps the chief puzzlement among Indians about the nationwide celebration is their amazement at the white man’s idea of progress” (80). Developing the latter point, Deloria reports:

Indians wonder how the white man could have achieved such startling moral and economic bankruptcy in only 200 years. The evolution of American statesmen from Washington and Jefferson to Nixon and Kissinger seems to defy the theory of progress, and in view of modern taxing policies, the celebration of a revolution against unjust taxation appears the height of folly.

Deloria ends his discussion of how “little has changed in two centuries that would bring the several tribes into the celebration with enthusiasm” by focusing on the promise of the future. “Looking toward the next hundred years,” Deloria notes, “Indians are depressed but still optimistic.” One area of hope is the dominant culture’s apparent changing attitudes toward the environment: “We have brought the white man a long way in nearly 500 years—from a childish search for mythical cities of gold and fountains of youth to the simple recognition that lands are essential for human existence.”

The potential for the settler nation to learn a more positive environmental ethic from American Indians appears in a number of Indigenous responses to 1976. Like Deloria, Momaday was asked to write for a special issue of a major publication, National Geographic. Their July 1976 issue is titled “This Land of Ours,” and as explained by the editor, “We at the Geographic decided that The Land was at the heart of the matter in this July of 1976—the land and how our people have used, often abused, often cherished, often exploited, and often fought over it” (1). Momaday’s title for his contribution, “A First American Views His Land,” is playful: while his audience may assume that this “First American” is the contemporary author, he evokes the perspective of the mythic “First Man” and imagines how the earliest ancestors might have viewed the land “one hundred centuries ago” to suggest how neither the idea of the sacred nor the concept of conservation is static but rather evolves (13). Threaded through this meditation are passages from the poem “New World” from The Gourd Dancer, also published in 1976.⁵⁰ In his magisterial style, Momaday, who was then a professor at Stanford, never actually mentions the bicentennial by name. Instead, he states matter-of-factly:

I tell my students that the American Indian has a unique investment in the American landscape. It is an investment that represents perhaps thirty thousand years of habitation. That tenure has to be worth something in itself—a great deal, in fact. The Indian has been here a long time; he is at home here. That simple and obvious truth is one of the most important realities of the Indian world, and it is integral in the Indian mind and spirit. (14)

Momaday responds to the settler conception of land “in terms of ownership and use” by stating, “This way of thinking of the land is alien to the Indian. His cultural intelligence is opposed to these concepts” (18). Momaday concedes nothing to dominant culture in its National Geographic. The conception he offers of the best future for the United States—for the entire planet—is presented wholly in Indigenous terms: “It is this ancient ethic of the Native American that must shape our efforts to preserve the earth and the life upon and within it” (18).⁵¹

Reports of Australia Day 2008 focused on the announcement made by Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister, that his first act upon opening Parliament would be to apologize to Indigenous Australians on behalf of the settler government. Not only Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia but also much of the colonizing, colonized, and formerly colonized world watched on television or over the Internet as Rudd kept his promise on February 13. In the apology, presented before the Australian House of Representatives, Rudd declares, “The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. [. . .] We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians.” Rudd amplifies his points with details of the history of Indigenous–settler relations and their possible, better future. Although speaking two decades after the last reenactment of the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Harbor, Rudd concludes with language reminiscent of the 1988 bicentennial: “First Australians, First Fleeters, and those who first took the Oath of Allegiance just a few weeks ago. Let’s grasp the opportunity to craft a new future for this great land: Australia” (emphasis added). A speech that should have been made twenty years earlier had finally been delivered. And although Indigenous Australians praised the symbolism and truth telling of Rudd’s long-overdue statement, they were understandably skeptical of its real-world effects.

Commentators around the globe noted that the United States has a colonial legacy similar to that of Australia’s—and to that of Canada, which made its own overdue statement to Indigenous peoples a few months later—but had yet to offer a formal apology.⁵² Apology bills have been introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate but have yet to pass. Senator Brownback, Republican of Kansas and principal sponsor of the Senate bill, has noted, “The resolution of apology does not authorize or serve as a settlement of any claim against the United States and does not resolve many of the challenges still facing Native peoples.”⁵³ Indeed, while many would welcome a formal apology, others understandably wonder, similar to their Australian counterparts, about real-world effects. The issues raised in anticipation of the U.S. bicentennial observances—broken treaties, water and resources rights, low standards of living, needs for better health facilities, housing, and education—remain inadequately addressed. And new issues have arisen in the intervening years, including the mismanagement of federal trust funds and new assaults on sovereignty in the era of tribal gaming. Much has changed since American Indians anticipated the U.S. bicentennial, but much remains the same.

If the settler Spirit of ’76 endures in the United States, does the Indigenous? Does the vision of integrated voices and collective action articulated by the Amerind Club at the University of Arizona, D’Arcy McNickle, and others in the 1970s also endure?

The answer appears to be emphatically yes. Native writers, artists, social commentators, and activists continue to anticipate collective futures alternative to those assumed and celebrated by the settler nation. To take one provocative example, in 2007 the award-winning Choctaw filmmaker Ian Skorodin and his Barcid Productions company released Crazy Ind’n The Movie, a twenty-minute stop-motion feature that stars plastic action figures in an alternative reality set in the near future. Carrying the visions of 1970s writers like Smith and Nasnaga forward into the Internet age, Skorodin imagines beyond armed resistance to the U.S. nation-state and physical reclamation of the North American continent to a multifront Indigenous uprising to retake the entire planet. The elaborate website built to support the Crazy Ind’n project offers this synopsis of relevant backstory:

The year is 2008, the Indigenous people have taken control. A small group of Aotearoans have seized New Zealand and invaded Australia, the Cook Islands, and Hawaii. South American Indian holy men hear of this and lead massive uprisings. Canada is quickly overrun by a coordinated and massive Aboriginal assault. The United States is surrounded by Indigenous forces. The U.S. loses California, Utah, and eventually the Midwest. Texas becomes a U.S. stronghold and the eastern seaboard is protected from an Indigenous takeover. A treaty is signed on the Tarahumara Nation-Texas border. . . .⁵⁴

In Crazy Ind’n The Movie the hero’s specific quest is to repatriate the skull of the Apache freedom fighter Geronimo, stolen from the cemetery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1921, which involves hand-to-hand combat with George Armstrong Custer the Tenth—“every Indian’s dream”—and a showdown with U.S. special forces led by none other than President George W. Bush. For the 2009 sequel, Crazy Ind’n The Feature, on behalf of the World Indigenous Council, based in La Paz, Bolivia, the hero leads “our brave soldiers of the Indigenous Preservation Forces (IPF) to Europe in search of stolen holy relics and the remains of our leaders”; significant actions in the ongoing campaign are reported as they happen by an “unbiased and trustworthy” Indigenous Television Network. These details echo and update the anticipatory techniques of Smith’s faux-documentary style and Nasnaga’s day-by-day reports. The world map featured on the Crazy Ind’n website, titled “Fear of a Red Planet . . . ,” gestures toward Nasnaga’s anticipatory vision, as well: parts of Europe have already been renamed, including a United Saami Federation in the north and, less expectedly, in central Europe, a New Anishinabe.⁵⁵ Skorodin’s project in stop-motion animation and real-time virtual reporting continues projects of truth telling begun in the American Indian anticipation of the U.S. bicentennial, and it highlights the power of anticipatory fiction to imagine alternative futures, even during periods of crisis and assault. Crazy Ind’n anticipates a future of active Native presence not merely national, transnational, or global in its reach but profoundly trans-Indigenous.